Youth and Moral Panic

The focus of this chapter is moral panic theory and specific moral panics associated with youth and youth culture. The moral panics discussed comprise a specific incident or a series of incidents that satisfy the conditions for the presence of a moral panic (Cohen 2002) and comprise school shootings, the James Bulger case, mods and rockers in the U.K., mugging in the U.K., the so-called “juvenile superpredators,” girl violence and gang violence. In each of these instances a set of circumstances generated a moral panic, in some cases orchestrated by the media,¹ which led to official action, usually in the form of punitive legislation or a heightened level of social control through government regulation. The actual responses to these moral panics were predicated on the need to confront and control violent youth and prevent further acts of violence. Because of the “threat” they presented, the youth were cast as “folk devils,” and therefore, according to officials, justified a punitive response. In explaining the basis for moral panics, Stanley Cohen has noted that in Britain recurrent forms of moral panic have been linked to youth culture and that these cultures have been associated with violence (Cohen 2002: 1). As Thompson explains, “no age group is more associated with risk in the public imagination than that of ‘youth’” (1998: 44). It is, first, necessary to explore the theoretical underpinnings of moral panic and to examine how adolescence is conceptualized.